shilsen
Adventurer
exile said:
Check out the story hour of my Eberron game (see sig) for a very heavily story-oriented but also fairly sandbox-style campaign, which is into its 3rd year now and has taken PCs from 3rd to 13th level. I should also note, that in contrast to the OP's approach, I never use modules and I don't do dungeon crawls, and while combat happens regularly in the game, we normally average 1 combat a session, maybe 2, with 3 happening only once or twice.
Here's my particular approach to doing story + sandbox style. As both player and DM, I hate railroading. At the same time, I like strongly story-oriented games. So what I did was start the campaign off with all the PCs knowing each other and heading to Sharn, and have the players give me a background about their characters and how they knew the others. I began the first session with "Roll initiative!" as a group of sahuagin attacked the boat the PCs were on.
Once they got to Sharn, I had a couple of the contacts who arose from the backgrounds of the characters throw them a couple of plot hooks. The players, being fairly used to the idea that they should grab the first plot hook a DM gives them, went for the first but quickly found me handing them half a dozen more in the first couple of sessions. Each of them was drastically different from the other, but creative players could weave a couple of them together and go after more than one. I also explicitly told the players out of game that I did not have an overarching plot but would let one emerge from their choices. They were free to do whatever the heck they wanted, and could pursue any plot hook, or even ignore them all and do something else.
As the PCs pursued one plot hook, it opened up a few more, and some of the ones they neglected earlier also stayed around (and usually developed over time) and could be picked up later. And sometimes particular actions also created new plot hooks, like when the paladin went down alone to the docks without his armor flashing a lot of coin and promptly got mugged and kidnapped, which opened up a reason for the PCs to get involved with the Sharn underworld.
While all of this was going on, what I did was work backwards from the plot hooks the PCs followed and create ways to link them to the individual PCs' motivations and their backgrounds, so that their choices had even more relevance than they might have. In fact, a lot of the time I'd throw the plot hooks out with no planning done and only flesh them out after they were chosen. Which meant very little wasted creative time out of game for me, but required a significant amount of thinking on my feet and ad-libbing stuff in-game, which luckily I'm decent at and got much better at with practice.
So, eventually, the PCs found themselves involved in an overarching, world-spanning plot which took them across multiple countries (and levels) and involved all sorts of different adventures and hijinks of different kinds before they resolved it, which was inextricably tied up with their individual backgrounds and motivations and led to all sorts of interesting character development. But the entire thing was non-existent until they made the choices they did. I simply wove backwards instead of forwards and created greater meaning after the choices were made, instead of having decided on it beforehand. It wasn't too difficult and worked out much more satisfying for me and for the players.
I didn't go into precise details, since that would have taken too long, but hopefully that wasn't too vague. Does that answer some of your questions?
), then the stories write themselves and can have the added bonus of having considerable more player involvement than the "thrown into the situation" style of story arc - more or less because the PCs have the sense of having actively chosen their situation.
